“I think, though, that the failure of responsibility was linked to a failure of agency—the individual’s ability to affect the course of events. An enormous number of people today feel as if they have very little economic agency in their own lives: often, they are right to feel that. The decisions that affect their fates are taken far above their heads, and often aren’t conscious decisions at all, so much as they are the operation of large economic forces over which they have no control—impersonal forces whose effects are felt in directly personal ways.

It is difficult to feel responsible when you have no agency. Many of the people who did stupid things—who did things on that 0–10 scale—did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on…

The collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or less all of the time, overwhelming.”

-John Lanchester, “How We Were All Misled,” New York Review of Books

 

The author is talking explicitly about debt, but the sentiment is relevant to so much more.